A 28-year-old in Spain with no telescope or astronomy training used AI coding agents to search NASA data and flagged a potential new planet, about 1.4 times the size of Earth and 116 light-years away. He used a combination of tools, including Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.
It’s still only a candidate, but NASA’s TESS satellite starts watching the star the week of October 26. He’s already posted the exact times it should dim. If it dims on schedule, it shows that passionate hobbyists can use existing AI models to make real scientific discoveries.
This was originally posted as a New Arrival in Average Faces · The Catalog · №011, an issue of my weekly newsletter The Catalog. You can Subscribe for weekly insights, or get in touch to talk about what this means for your business.